


Circumcentre

by prairiecrow



Series: Geometry [21]
Category: Knight Rider (1982), Torchwood
Genre: Children, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Fatherhood, Gen, Immortality, POV Jack Harkness, Telepathic Bond, Toddlers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 03:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1413958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were home, all three of them, safely enclosed in a haven of beauty and love and peace. And at that instant Jack wouldn't have traded their cosy domesticity for all the riches, sex and adventure in the wide wild galaxy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circumcentre

Cooking with a toddler running around the kitchen is exactly as Jack remembers it from his brief stint as a father in the early 1900s: like Elsbeth, Norbert is a ball of restless energy on legs, relentlessly curious and always reaching up to grab things. KITT, who's chopping veggies for a salad, gives him a nice fat dragon carrot to keep him occupied, and he plumps himself down on his chubby little bottom with his back against the kitchen's centre island and applies himself to peeling the multi-limbed vegetable apart — for all of about five minutes. It's enough time for Jack to get the white sauce finished without grubby fingers tugging on his pants, and at this point he'll take whatever respite he can get. 

He smiles as he removes the pot from the convection stovetop and gives the contents a final brisk whisking, and reflects that he used to think of problems in terms of "Will it destroy the planet in the next thirty seconds, or do we have a little more time to jury rig a solution?" The scale of his battles is much smaller these days, and has a tendency to cry when it doesn't get its way. The most dramatic situation he's personally faced in the last six months was the afternoon when Norbert, chasing a butterfly down the garden steps, tripped and fell and tore a good strip of skin off his left knee and both hands: there'd been blood everywhere, and Norbert had howled long and loud enough to be heard on the next planet in the Tarrakon System, while Jack held him still in his arms and hushed his sobs with murmurs and kisses, and KITT applied a dermal sterilizer/regenerator to the wounds with swift efficiency. They'd all needed a good bath afterwards, and the day had ended with Norbert falling asleep on Jack's chest while his Daddy lay on the couch watching zero-G football on TVid, his tiny body blissfully knocked out by the small slice of chocolate cake they'd let him have at dinner as partial compensation for the pain and upset he'd endured.

Jack was pretty sure that most of the people who'd known him in his long and colourful — and frequently violent — life would have stared in amazement, seeing him carefully carry his drowsy infant son upstairs and tuck him into his crib, then stand there in the shadows with his hand resting on that plump little belly, watching the boy sleep with a fond smile on his face. He'd sired his fair share of children, and even dared to linger long enough to see a few of them past the baby stage, but Norbert was different: Jack intended to be a real father this time, someone who would guard and guide his offspring through all the stages of life, and who would be here to hold his son's own children in his arms one day. He could love Norbert with all his heart because their hour of final parting wouldn't come for decades yet, if he could possibly help it.

This was no fleeting pause in the midst of constant frenetic motion. They were home — 

In his mind, from the living room below, a warm inviting tap on the empathic network: _Jak'xhim?_

— all three of them, safely enclosed in a haven of beauty and love and peace. And at that instant, Jack wouldn't have traded their cosy domesticity for all the riches, sex and adventure in the wide wild galaxy.

He cupped Norbert's dark-haired head briefly in his broad hand, bent to kiss his sleeping baby's cheek, then went downstairs to make passionate love to his husband in front of their hearth's ever-burning fire.

[THE END]

**Author's Note:**

> If anybody would like to see more of this (it's projected to be a series of domestic vignettes involving Norbert as the child of two immortals), please let me know. :)


End file.
